How Do You Cook Lima Beans (Aka Butter Beans)?
There wasn’t a Thanksgiving in my home, when I a was a girl, that didn’t include lima beans. For that matter, lima beans were a side dish at practically every Sunday-with-the-kinfolks meal. Only, we usually called them butter beans. Lima beans are popular in the southern part of the United States, perhaps less so in other regions, but good anywhere and any time, in my biased opinion. The trick is to cook them right. Oddly enough, cooking lima beans the right way does not mean cooking them the way I remember most of my southern kin did it, and even the way the restaurants we frequented did. They all seemed to think you had to cook them into mush, as well as oversalt them. If that’s how you are used to eating lima beans, and you enjoy them that way, then don’t let me stop you. But be aware that the recipes I give below are calibrated to produce limas that are about halfway between “hard” and “mush” on the cooked beans scale. One fact I recently learned is that lima beans are more souther
